E3 Hands-On: Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 - Preview

Those of you who read my review of the first Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm will know that while I thought the game was great it had some obvious issues. The most damning issue was that the missions were very repetitive with most of them being a standard match with different characters and although the set piece battles and cutscenes that were shown looked great there weren’t enough. Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm 2 seems to have listened to these issues as it appears to have addressed them all.

Naruto UNS2 starts from the beginning Naruto Shippuden part of the series in which Naruto has grown quite a bit older while training with his sensei and goes atleast until Pain attacks the Hidden Village of the Leaf. The level I played was a boss fight controlling Naruto with Sakura in support against Kakashi.

After a first half of the fight that was pretty standard the battle moved to a different area where Kakashi would stand on rocks that surrounded a pool with a few small islands in the middle. Kakashi would then call upon water dragon magic to attack me while I had no way to counter. After a while he would dive back into the pool and electrify the water which could only be avoided by standing on dry land. Once you figure out the trick to the fight it isn’t difficult to win, but it was nice to have a battle that was different than the standard.

The representative for Namco Bandai at the booth told me that the sequel had over 40 characters and far more boss fights and cutscenes than the first, which is great to hear since the engine looks amazing as ever and I really liked the few cutscenes I got in the first. One thing they didn’t change that I love is Dual Language support is still there so I won’t have to listen to Naruto say “believe it” at every given opportunity. Naruto UNS2 will be releasing this Fall for Xbox360 and PS3 and I implore every fan of the anime or manga to give it a look, based on what I’ve seen so far you won’t be disappointed.